Fbot re-emerged, the backstage

Mirai Fbot is back with the stronger infection speed, “Currently FBOT’s infection speed is about 100 nodes per day.. Don’t trust me, trust the number”, said the researcher who figured the come-back…”

In the previous month we covered the mystery behind the Mirai botnet variant dubbed as “Fbot” after the threat’s latest encryption was disclosed by security researcher unixfreaxjp of the MalwareMustDie team. The article we published ended with the question “Would it mean that the coder of Fbot is abandoning his botnet after all of this time?”

Fbot historically has been a part of Mirai
variant for some years by now, leveraging the leak source code of other Mirai
variants made by different coders and improving them to be better than other rival
IoT botnets, obviously to make more infection hits

In this article we successfully interviewed unixfreaxjp,,
the researcher who analyzed this re-emerging threat. When he was asked about
how he thinks about the FBot re-emerging, he commented “..although we are all hoping
that the bad actors will stop their malicious activities seeing that the new
propagation had stopped for a month during our monitoring, to only realizing
that the actors were only actually put the botnet into sleep and rebuilt their
botnet technology to be better in evasion and propagation..”

About how recent Fbot was started to come into
his attention, he explained “..basically we monitored all Linux threats
non-stop, not only the ones aiming IoT, but all of them, to seek how the Linux
threat landscape situated recently, what
technology is used mostly now, and to understand their trends. We dealt with a lot of malware and
their threat actors for these past seven years, and any threat can come-back
again as long as the motivation, bad adversaries and weak target are still laying around, And
Fbot is a good example for the case..”

The speed of new variant of Fbot has been
reported as super fast, when we came into this topic he replied “..Fbot
owned significant amount of botnet before, like thousands IoT devices, they can
go back to previous infection volume easy due to the circumstance for spreading
the infection is on adversaries side, I think that is what the malware coder
and bot herder is expecting from this wave as his first stage. However he
learned from previous cases too, by improving the evasion technique using the
hexstring-push method to drop the loader into the IoT”

What is the “hexstring-push”
method mentioned in the post? Is it a new trick in IoT infection? Could you
explain more of it? “..Well, a “hexstring-push” is just a term I made, since I don’t know
how to call this techniques, it’s when
an actor is sending a textual-basis data which is actually a binary that can be
saved or injected and to be executed in the targeted machine. This is not a new
matter since exploitation development is using this concept for so long, and
recent post-exploitation frameworks
aiming multiple operating systems are utilizing the same concept too. The
adversary is in an experimental stage by using this concept to pivot against
commonly known download commands that can block their infection..”

You wrote that there are embedded binaries
inside the Mirai FBot, are they the same as the “hex-pushed” ones? What is
their purpose? “..Good questions, those embedded ELF are Mirai Fbot downloaders, they
call it as “loader”, and yes, in the ones I analyzed it is coded as same as the
“hexstring” one. The purpose of this “loader” is to download Fbot from the C2
servers to the successfully compromised IoT device.”

You have just mentioned about C2 (Command and
Control) servers, how many are they? And who owns them? “..Yes,since you asked about
this, I just updated our report with the C2 servers used, it is explained as
per below table. The alleged owners are the threat actor related individuals,
that are possible a hands out environment through many hands.”

The published analysis post contains a lot of information of the infected IoT devices and the record of the infection is clearly shown to show all of us the speed of infection. The infection that has been started to be detected on February 22, 2020 as 582 nodes has become 1,086 nodes within 3days, and it was reportedly Mirai Fbot to have the infection rate of 100 nodes per day.

At this point we asked about the handling of fast Fbot infection: “How do you propose to stop Fbot botnet from its fast spreading, knowing that the infection speed is high?”, and the reply is “..Very good question. As usual in IoT threat, the actors want their botnet to spread wide under the radar and owning as much IoT as they can get, and stay maintaining the ownership of those IoT until they are ready to do some action as a service for several bad activities like DDoS, traffic cushion for further hacks, malware proxy , and so on. Fbot is not different. Lucky that we disclosed the come-back wave early, so hopefully we had the awareness in place, that’s the first important step. The next step is, no one can fight this type of threat alone, we are all have different limitation, but now security communities are all in a form of coordination to work together to mitigate this type of the threat, by spotting new infection techniques, recording new C2 for blocking purpose, patching the vulnerability the botnet aims to infect, informing CSIRT for services to be more aware of the threat, and applying better IoT policies. Hopefully these steps will suppress the propagation speed of the infection.”

In their post it is clearly written there are
countries that are having faster infection than others. When asked about this
matter, this is what unixfreaxjp replied: “IoT devices are varied in many countries,
not only about variation in vendors, but the policy and usability within
involved carriers. In countries that are having a top-down security scheme to
control their infected IoT devices the infection can be handled fast. In other
countries that don’t have such vertical control schemes for IoT yet, they are
dwelling variation of horizontal obstacles, from rules and policies, business
chain matters and privacy issues , to handle an on-going infection. There is
also a factor of unknown vulnerability that has been exploited that can boost
infection on a specific region users only.
So, there is no best formula for fast handling, but, it has been proven
that the countries that can control IoT devices are less-affected, this is what
I think.”

The number of the infection on February 25,
2020 is showing that Taiwan, Hongkong, and Vietnam are having bigger infection
ratio compared to other affected countries.

We have learned much experience from the Mirai Fbot re-emerging case. What seems to be the end of a botnet can be a sign of a new beginning, and also by working together we can control IoT malware infection into a very minimum level. If the motivation, bad actors and the target are there, the same threat could rise again, and again. It is all up to us to police a better policy to prevent it from happening again.

Share On

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer.
Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US.
Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines.
Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

This site uses cookies, including for analytics, personalization, and advertising purposes. For more information or to change your cookie settings, click here.

If you continue to browse this site without changing your cookie settings, you agree to this use.AcceptRead More

Privacy and Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.

Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.

Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.